Severed Ties: A Dark Stalker Romance (Tainted Love Book 1)
Severed Ties: Chapter 2

Anger is a part of my everyday life. You don’t torture people without having anger in your very soul, and that’s a big part of what I do for Frost Industries. But I’ve never felt this kind of rage before. The possessive need to protect Clara beats through my veins until it hurts, and even with my arms wrapped around her, holding her tight against me despite it making my skin crawl, there’s no calming it.

What the hell was she thinking? She could have been hurt, or worse, she could have been killed. Just the thought of the only light in my life no longer breathing makes my skin crawl and my fingers tighten on her belly. I shouldn’t be holding her so tight. I’m likely hurting her, but I can’t bring myself to unwrap my body from around hers, not yet.

I almost didn’t make it in time. The cunts on the street just watched. Their mouths agape as my fawn was almost hit by that idiot driver. I’ve made a mental note of the registration to ask Everett to get me their details. I can’t allow someone who was willing to hurt Clara to walk this earth.

Her tiny body trembles in my arms, but she’s holding on to my arms around her for dear life, like I’m the only thing holding her together, and I like being that for her. Even if her hands on me make my stomach lurch uncomfortably, I’m willing to deal with it for her, for her comfort.

“What are you doing here?” she asks after long minutes. The crowd that was willing to watch her be run over by that asshole has dispersed and no one is paying us any attention. Good. Everyone that looks at Clara makes my hit list. She’s mine, and I don’t want anyone so much as glancing over her perfect body.

That’s a good question. One I haven’t come up with an answer for among the chaos. Perhaps I should have a lie ready, seeing as I spend a good amount of my time following her around and breaking into her apartment, even going so far as to lie next to her as she sleeps just to feel her breath against my face, but somehow it never occurred to me that at some stage she may catch me. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years, and there’s a reason people call me a ghost. If I don’t want you to see me, you won’t see me. Except for today. To be fair, I have started to get bolder recently. Some days going as far as bumping into her in the street to get a whiff of her perfume, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before I got a little too comfortable.

“Everett has me doing routine checks of Frost staff.” The lie falls from my lips easily, as if it’s practiced and planned. But it’s not.

“Oh.” Her voice falls, sadness crawling into the sound. “That makes sense, I suppose.”

It doesn’t. We don’t have any enemies at present, so our staff has never been safer than they are right now. Hell, Chicago has never been safer.

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.” She tugs on my hold on her, and I’m forced to drop my arms despite how badly I want to keep her warmth against me. I don’t like to be touched, but having Clara in my arms is something else. It’s different from having a meaningless fuck brush her fingers down my arm. She’s different.

Her first step forward seems steady enough, but when her face contorts with pain on the second, I move without thought and hold my arms on either side of her, making sure I’ll be able to catch her if she falls.

“Are you sure?” I raise a brow in question.

“The car clipped my leg,” she admits quietly, her head dropping in resignation.

I hate when she does this. She’s shy, sure, but there’s something else. I notice it every time something happens that inconveniences someone else, even if it’s slight. But why? Wynter is always praising her, always pushing her to be the best she can be, to take on bigger projects, to take on parts of her role so she can have maternity leave and take a step back as CFO, but she has no confidence. She doesn’t believe in herself the way the people around her do.

Before I’ve consciously made the decision to do it, I lift her into my arms, causing a little yelp from her chest. “Tommy, put me down,” she snaps.

“No.”

“Yes.”

I stare down at her fiery eyes and replace the corners of my lips tugging up into a smirk. “It’s cute that you think you have any choice in this.” I stride across the road, checking both ways three times before stepping into the street. I won’t risk her safety, not ever.

She looks as if she’s going to argue, but her words die before they can make it from between her pretty, plump lips when a cold gust of wind wraps around us and causes her to burrow into me. Despite the way my stomach lurches when her arms wrap around my neck, brushing over scars she has no way to know are there, the way she leans into me makes another part of me relish in the possessiveness of having her need me. I want her to rely on me for everything. I want to be the first person she calls when she needs something, and this is just the start of that. She will come to need me. Because I’m going to make it impossible for her to breathe without me.

I push the door of her apartment building open and stroll up the stairs like I’m not carrying another human in my arms. I lug a lot of heavy fuckers around, so Clara is tiny in comparison to those assholes.

“Do you remember which one it is?” she asks and I barely catch myself before I tell her I’ve been breaking in at night for months. She can’t know that, not yet, maybe not ever. Wynter and Snow have been surprisingly understanding with Everett and Elijah around their stalking tendencies, but Clara doesn’t strike me as someone who is going to replace it endearing like they do.

“Yeah.”

I walk straight to the door and hold out my hand for her key. I could reach into my pocket for the one I had cut after the first night. I couldn’t handle being on the outside looking in, but we’re not there yet. I can’t have her not trust me when I’ve only just walked into the light.

She passes me the key and I make quick work of unlocking her apartment. The familiar scent of vanilla and strawberries assaults me as I step into the ridiculously clean apartment. I’ve been here most nights over the last few months, and I’ve yet to see anything out of place. But perhaps that’s because she just doesn’t have much. Her possessions are mostly things that she needs. Clothes. Appliances. Things she couldn’t survive without. But there are no photos, no personal items, and nothing that gives anything away about her personality. If I hadn’t spent eight months getting to know her from afar, I wouldn’t be able to surmise anything about her from the clinical white space.

I place her down on the cream couch and immediately move to tug her boots from her legs. They’re my favorite pair, and if I didn’t know better, I would think she wears them on purpose just to taunt me some days. Today she paired them with a gray coat and a short black knit dress and it’s the combination that makes me want to strip every layer of clothing from her body and fuck her until her every pore leaks with my scent.

“I can do that.”

“I’m sure you can,” I say, not bothering to look up at her. “But I’m going to do it for you. You’re hurt, and I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to make sure I’m okay? I mean, if you were only here for a routine check, why does it matter if I’m hurt?”

I finally drag my eyes up to meet hers and see a hint of challenge behind the brown pools, which is unlike her. She’s not a confrontational person. Not in the slightest. To the point that when Wynter set up a meeting a few weeks ago to run through what she needs Clara to do while she’s on leave to have the baby, I watched her descend into a complete nervous breakdown because she thought she was in trouble for something.

“You’re about to take over Wynter’s workload, so it’s important you are in good health.”